


Half Turn to Go Yet Turning Stay

by embroiderama



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every hunter has a moment when their ordinary lives fell apart. In the wake of another ending, Ellen remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half Turn to Go Yet Turning Stay

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [](http://pheebs1.livejournal.com/profile)[**pheebs1**](http://pheebs1.livejournal.com/) for the very helpful beta.
> 
> _"Better by far you should forget and smile  
> Than that you should remember and be sad."_
> 
> _"Remember" by Christina Rossetti_

Admitting it burned like bad Mexican in her gut, but ignorance really was bliss once upon a time. The early days with Billy, tight as things were -- even then she knew it was heaven. They'd pooled their savings and the money she got from her mama's life insurance to buy the bar, got out of their dead-end jobs. Billy went on hunting trips sometimes when she couldn't imagine what was in season, but she trusted him not to be fooling around. Even if he was actually playing poker in some old hunting cabin for the weekend, she didn't much mind.

The time to herself was good, and when Joanna Beth came along she just put her in one of those baby carriers and toted her around from the kitchen to the bar, chatting away as she worked. The roadhouse started to get busier, a lot more traveling men than locals, but that was fine. She didn't take guff and didn't tolerate anybody cussing in front of her little girl, and most everyone respected that enough to keep the peace.

She broke that rule herself the day she learned the truth, cussed him up one side and down the other for keeping so much from her.

That day, early in the morning before the roadhouse opened, a battered old station wagon came skidding into the lot, kicking up gravel and the stink of burning rubber. One of the guys she saw in the place from time to time--wiry man with the sun baked into his skin--tumbled out of the driver's seat calling out for Billy. Halfway to the door, he collapsed to his knees, and Ellen didn't even think about listening to her husband when he told her to stay back.

"They got my scent," he moaned, clutching at his bleeding thigh. "Jesus, they got my scent!"

Movement out by the road caught her attention and Ellen looked up to see a pack of dogs loping down the middle of the asphalt a hundred yards or so away. Three of them--biggest black dogs she'd ever seen - and as she watched they paused to test the air with their noses. A charge raised the hair on her arms. She thought she must have blinked or looked away, but the dogs seemed to jerk like a video tape caught in the player for a second before they suddenly stepped off the road and onto the roadhouse's lot.

"Billy!" She backed up toward the roadhouse door, ready to let them tear her apart before they touched her baby girl.

Billy jumped to his feet, lunging through the door of the station wagon and coming out with a rifle that he pointed at the animals. "I oughta let them kill you, Hawkins--leading those things to my door."

"Rifle's no good," Hawkins panted. "Ran outa iron shot. Jesus fuck Bill, I didn't know where else to go."

Billy pulled out the pistol he kept tucked into the waist of his jeans and fired at the dogs, but Ellen could see they didn't do more than pause at the noise. "Ell, grab the rifle from under the glasses behind the bar! Not the one back with the bottles, the one under the cabinet. Hurry!"

Ellen ran like those dogs were chomping on her heels and dropped to her knees to grab the old rifle Bill said was for emergencies. Hesitating a second, she took the pistol by the bottles, too. A couple of breaths got her back out the door. The dogs were circled around the far side of the car, closing in on Hawkins where he crouched in the gravel by the driver's side door. And Bill--holding them off with the gun in his hands and a violence in his eyes she'd never seen before.

He looked away from the dogs just long enough to grab the rifle from her hands, and when he shot the first dog in the head it went out with an unearthly howl that vibrated sickly in Ellen's chest and started Joanna crying inside the house. The other two dogs leapt for Bill, clearing the car in a way no dog ought to be able to, and Ellen felt her whole life ending. She raised the pistol and shot at the same time that Bill pulled off a shot that killed the second dog.

The third was on Hawkins already when Bill took it out, but with another of those terrible cries it fell to the side, revealing the wiry man on the ground still breathing, his leg torn all to hell.

~~~

Ellen learned about first-aid then, bandaging Hawkins' leg with an old stained table cloth to keep some of his blood inside him until Billy could get him to the hospital. She learned that not everything living on the earth had been covered in her high school biology class. She and Billy carried the bodies of the dogs out to the back lot for burial. Black blood oozed out from their oily, stinking fur and she bit down hard to keep from gagging.

"What the hell was that? Why didn't the regular bullets kill 'em?"

"Iron shot's the only thing that works on those beasts. And that pistol you brought?" He took the gun from her hand and put the safety back on. "Didn't do nothin' but waste a little of my mother's silver."

Ellen shook her head and watched as Billy all but tossed Hawkins into his truck for the ride to the hospital. Inside, she scrubbed her hands until they were sore and then went to get Jo from her playpen. She wrapped her little legs around Ellen's middle and cried out her anger at being left in the house all by herself. By the time Jo had calmed down Billy was back, washing his own hands.

Ellen fixed it in her mind--what she'd seen, what Billy had done, the way he'd known what was going on, while she'd been struggling to wake up from some dream like a Stephen King movie. She put Jo down and walked out to meet him in the hall.

"You tell me the truth you son of a bitch," she seethed low and quiet, keeping back the shouts that would have set Jo to crying again. "What the hell were those things? How the hell did you know what to do?"

She expected Billy to fight back, scrap with her the way they had about which building to buy for the bar, about whether it was the right time for a baby with the business so new. He just looked down, rubbing his hands together in front of his belly. "I'm sorry, Ell. I never wanted you to see anything like that."

"Well I did see it, and I sure as hell want to know what's going on. I'm not your mother, not gonna turn a blind eye on things."

Billy shook his head and firmed his jaw--stubborn. "This won't happen again--that's for damn sure and all you need to know."

"Bullshit. You tell me the truth or Joanna Beth and I are getting on a bus to my sister's today."

Billy closed his eyes. "Sometimes I think that would be better."

"I love you." She clamped a hand hard around his arm. "And you don't get off that easy."

~~~

He told her, finally. Down in the bar, too early still for customers, they sat with the bottle of whiskey between them and he told her about the things his father had taught him to hunt, about the men who came through the roadhouse on their way to hunts of their own. Most of what he said was crazy enough to get him locked up for life, but she knew the truth in his eyes when she saw it just as clearly as she'd known those dogs weren't anything natural. He promised he was careful, smarter than some asshole like Hawkins, but she knew well enough what could happen.

The day John Winchester showed up at her door with his hat in his hand and her husband's blood on his coat she was surprised more by the depth of her grief than by the news itself.

Billy and the other hunters were usually smart, kept the hunt far away from the door of the roadhouse. After the war started for real, after they let an army of demons slip out of hell, after John's sons both tasted death, Ellen returned to the burnt-out shell of the dream she'd built with Billy. She had a lot of work to do, but just for a little while she let herself close her eyes and forget all of the terrible things she'd seen and heard over the years, forget the friends she'd lost. She thought about the shady patch back behind the house where she'd lain back in the grass with Billy and made Jo between them. She saw the three of them having a picnic, Jo crawling around on the table cloth, squishing black ants between her pudgy pink fingers.

She saw the life she'd imagined, the bar they meant to build up and sell for their retirement. When she opened her eyes she saw the scorched reality, ruined with the ashes of her friends. She would rebuild it, she'd give the surviving hunters a place to come again, but she wasn't ready yet. Sitting back on the bench seat of her truck, she closed her eyes again and took another minute to forget.


End file.
